Get Your Website Ranked Higher On Google & Other Search Engines

The first and the most important thing to do in order to get any website recognized as an important source of information and as an authority by the Search Engines is to follow the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards and guidelines for building websites. As W3C is a community organization that develops web standards, the Search Engines take to into account its recommendations. So it is very simple - W3C compliant site means a well optimized website.

The second thing to understand is that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a competition. In theory any website positioned in a certain market niche competes to all other similar sites for high ranking in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). However, this does not make the website SEO a horse race! It is more like a engineering competition or other similar contest where the top places are usually won by those who are the most creative and innovative. So, always have in mind that websites are about to used by people and their web pages must look good, be readable and usable for humans, not for the Search Engines robots. So it is much better to simply ignore the Search Engines and to built your website to be user-friendly and useful resource in your niche, rather than following the advises provided in the thousands SEO guides, available on the web.

Does HTML Code & Web Standards affects the Website SEO?

If you hire a SEO specialist who answers a question "How do we start working on the Website optimization?" with something like "We need to review your meta Tags, in the first place", you would know that this is a wrong answer, but it is definitely not the correct one. Our suggestion is to start with a review of the website code.

W3C's Markup Validator helps for an optimized website?

At the time we have been preparing this article, one of our Managed Website specialists decided to check HC home page for W3C compliance with the W3C's Markup Validator and have found out that we have two issues to resolve on our index page. He suggested to remove "type="text/javascript" from the code provided from a 3rd party application (in this particular example it was the one that integrates the Live chat to HostColor.com). There was another minor coding issue we have fixed and the W3C Validator has displayed a nice and friendly message saying "Document checking completed. No errors or warnings to show". As a result of the time we have taken to create a useful content for HC clients and HostColor.com Blog readers, we have paid attention to our own website and fixed to minor mistakes on its HTML code. This is a lesson to learn - when someone helps others, one would always find a way to improve its own position.

You have a W3C compliant website. Check what Google thinks about it!

Go to Google PageSpeed Insights. It will give you Google's recommendations on what to improve in the website's back end. For example at the time we are publishing this article, there are there recommendations by PageSpeed Insights for the HC Index page: "Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content", "Reduce server response time" and "Leverage browser caching". I guess that this text would give us some motivation to get our PageSpeed Insight desktop version compliance score increased from from 95 to 100 anytime soon. We'd also need to pay more attention to HostColor.com mobile version where we have another important thing to do - to "Prioritize visible content". Most websites which are created to be used on desktops, have some issues with their mobile versions. It is a good idea to check are there any at your end and to fix them. As more and more people use mobile devices to browse the web, Search Engines expect websites to be fully compatible with the browser versions used on mobile phones and tablets. A low score given to the mobile version of any website, means that it has a lower chance to be ranked high in the Search Engine Results Pages compared to other similar websites, which have well optimized mobile phone versions.

To rank high on Google you need yo use Google Webmaster!

It will give you some information on how Google Search Engine reads your website. Information such as "Crawl Errors", "Crawl Stats" and "Fetch as Google" are really important. Pay attention to the sections "robots.txt Tester", "Sitemaps" and "Security Issues". If your website runs any kind of advertising, it is a very good idea to spend time in section "Ad Experience Report" where you can check whether your advertising sections and code comply with the Better Ads Standards.

There are many other tools which would give you information about what to optimize on any website. One of them we have used for reference is Gtmetrix.com. We haven't linked it as lining is another thing website owners should be very careful with. The rule is simple: "Link only to the most important relevant content of highest possible quality and do not turn you website or web page into a link farm". This rules answers the question "Do I submit my website to various Internet directories?". The answer is "No", as many of them are considered as "Link Farms", by the search engines.

Website SEO & Web Page Content - Useful & High Quality

What are the things that help for any website to rank high in the search engines? There is no need to tell you that the better grammatical and language skills the person who creates and maintains your website has, the better experience your website users would have. The level of literacy is decreasing worldwide, despite that people have access to any kind of information, which would help them to improve their language and writing skills. So, many of them would not even recognize a spelling mistake. Still, this is not a good reason to have them on your website (as we most certainly do on ours).

1. Think about your website as a virtual equivalent of a store, restaurant or any other place in the physical world you might visit. It must be well organized and as less confusing as possible. Whoever loads any of your web pages must immediately find what one is looking for and must be given instructions where to search. We follow one golden rules in website development and optimization: "The less content, the better".

2. Some people have time other's don't. So your website must serve both categories equally good. If any web page follows any topic which requires a lot of content to be published, you'd simply use a well-written and informative summary of the the and give your site visitor an option to "Read the whole article" on the same or into a different page.

3. Write as interesting as possible and as short as possible. Your website ins not a a fictional book (unless it is, then we are terribly wrong). However, if it not, keep it short. People would spend 15 to 90 seconds on certain web page, if it is not a news or a reference one. Do not expect them to stay longer.

4. There is a magical word in the Internet Marketing called "conversion". It describes the process of making the stranger a customer. I must admit that we do not understand it very well and you should speak to any marketeer or to an experienced sales professional on that. What we can do is to make your website as friendly as possible, so whoever comes to stay and eventually register, buy or do whatever you like them to do.

5. When it comes to Website SEO (Search Engine Optimization), most of those who you'd hire to do it, would tell you to include as many "important search keywords and phrases" as possible in in your web pages. Some would even turn a web page to a meaningless bunch of "important keywords". Do not go this way, it is the wrong one. It is important to have some of the most important keywords and phrases related to your business niche or activity, on the web page. Just don't do it intentionally for the purpose of having "well-optimized" website. We are a web hosting provider and we want you to become our client, but we haven't mention our products or services in this article with one min or exception - the Managed Website reference above. We have done it to suggest that we have a team of professionals who work client-side provide and technical and system administration on our clients installations, websites and apps.

It is acceptable to refer to any of your products and services in your Blog or informational pages. Just do it only when the reference would be helpful to your website users and do not do it very often.

Speaking about keywords and phrases, I'd point your attention to the word "website", we have used many times in this article. If we are about to follow the "best SEO practices", we need to reduce the use of this keyword, as this web page is very likely to be oversaturated on it. There is only one synonym of the "website" and we'd rather serve our Blog readers than the Search Engines. Sometimes, things that work for humans aren't good for the Search Engine robots. Who would you choose?

Are There Any Tricks To Get A Website Ranked Higher On Google?

Yes, they are many, but not all of them will have a long term positive effect on your website. Many of those who offer SEO services, have sites created for the sole purpose of linking to other websites and to make money out of it. They offer you a "SEO Package" and then you'd probably see some improvement in ranking in the SERP for certain "important keywords and phrases". It will be short-lived SEO romance for your website. Search engines have sandboxes where they put websites that participate to link farms, so do not do it.

There are certain things that would boost your search engine visibility, but most of them are not part of a list, which any SEO Gurus could take out of their pockets. The best way to make sure that your website is well optimized is to follow the W3C guidelines and make sure that your website complies with the rules set by Google and other Search engines and to hire someone who is creative, innovative and has the knowledge to improve the overall quality of your website.

Can HC help your web based business?

As you have already notices, you are on Host Color's (HC) website and we are one of the most reliable provider os hosted services, not just in the Midwestern U.S., but also worldwide. Is you need a management service in the U.S., review our plans that feature Web Hosting with Website SEO & Management. If you need a similar service in Europe, visit our European Managed Web Hosting site.

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